Which Course?

How do you choose the right course for you? Rule 1: do what you enjoy and you'll enjoy what you do. ​

Considering courses: A few questions

What career do you want?

What course or courses might help you get it?

What do you enjoy studying?

What course might you enjoy, but haven’t tried yet?

Would you like to do more than one subject?

Would you like a vocational element to your course?

How much flexibility would you like about your course once you’ve started it?

For any course you’re considering, have you checked what the course includes? (Remember: it varies from university to university.)

For any course you’re considering, have you checked out how it’s taught? (Remember: it varies from university to university.)

How would you like your course to be graded? What form of assessment suits you? Which Uni?

your plans

If you have your heart set on a career

If you don't know what you want to do

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IF YOU ALREADY HAVE YOUR HEART SET ON A CAREER, then you can work backwards. What’s going to help you job-wise?

You may need to limit yourself to certain courses. For instance, for medicine, dentistry and various other professions, there are certain bits of paper you have to be able to frame on your wall.

But that’s not true for every career. Even lawyers and teachers — who also require specific qualifications — can start off with more general degrees and then take postgraduate conversion courses.

In many cases, it doesn’t actually take any longer. For example, most Bachelor of Education courses (which qualify you to be a teacher) take four years — but in the same time you could spend three years studying whatever undergraduate degree grabs your fancy followed by a year doing a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education). You end up just as well qualified and, at the moment, most PGCE students can get more funding.However, if you’re only sure of the general direction you want your career to take, don’t sweat it — just keep your options open. Most graduate jobs need nothing more than a degree in something vaguely appropriate. But that still means thinking about what course might be vaguely appropriate so that when the crunch comes you’ve got the credentials.

For journalism, say, you might want to think about politics or English. For conservation work, you’d be better off with something like geography, biology, or ecology. But for a job in business, you could pick almost anything: accountancy, languages, business studies, marketing, computing, economics.

A word of warning: some courses that may seem career-specific don’t necessarily help. The classic example is media studies. Push isn’t dismissing all media studies courses — some are great, particularly if they focus on the technical aspects of the industry — but if you want to work in TV, for instance, a non-‘media’ degree could actually help you stand out from the crowd more. If the BBC’s making a programme about the mating rituals of wombats, for example, they’re more likely to give a break to someone who studied zoology and worked on their student TV station than to someone who spent three years doing Marxist analyses of Eastenders plotlines.

But, if you aren't so sure of what you want to do or study FEAR NOT! Have a look at Bestcourse4me which can help you on your way.

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM UNIVERSITY?

Ultimately, your choice of course depends on what you want from your university.

Here’s a quick guide:You want to get a good job: Try to be specific about what kind of good job you want. Then do a course that’s, at best, a direct qualification, or at least, vaguely appropriate. You might want to consider ‘vocational’ courses. These are any courses designed to teach you a particular career — although not only do they not necessarily guarantee you a job, they may not even help you get one.

Vocational courses — particularly the best ones — usually involve some kind of link with the relevant industry. Sometimes they’re even 'sandwich courses' — which means you spend some time actually working for a company (and, yes, you do get paid). There are thick sandwiches and thin sandwiches, depending on the amount of time you spend working. (There are probably club sandwich courses somewhere too, but Push suspects they’re part of a catering degree.) Some universities, particularly the ones that used to be polytechnics, specialise in vocational courses. Many of them have excellent relations with businesses and employers and their graduates get jobs easily. Others don’t .

Sometimes, if you want to get a good job, it doesn’t matter what course you do, so long as you’re at a university with a good reputation.

You want to study for the sheer thrill of academic endeavour: Again, follow your fancy. You’re clearly already committed (or perhaps should have already been committed to an asylum).

You want to have a good time: There’s no such thing as a ‘doss’ course at university. If you want to do well, you pretty much have to put in the hours whatever the subject.

Having said that, there are some subjects where the course is rigidly structured — lectures and the like from nine to five, plus lots of work at weekends — and there are others where you get to manage your own time a bit more. Traditionally, it’s the sciences where your daily schedule is wall-to-wall, and it’s arts students who earn the reputation for lying in bed all day. Many arts students, however, work just as hard — it’s simply that they have huge reading lists and are often left to get on with it.

To have a good time, the same rule always applies: pick a course you’re going to enjoy, then grab the other opportunities that student life chucks at you.

More info

THE COURSE STYLE

THE COURSE STYLE

It’s not just what courses a university offers that affects its atmosphere, but how they’re taught — one teaching method may work for you, another may not.

If the timetable is heavy — full of long lectures, seminars and practicals — then it doesn’t leave too much time in the day for the favourite student pastime of sitting around, drinking coffee and chatting. That means the place feels less laid-back. But ‘laid-back’ may not be what you want anyway — that’s your call.

It may also mean there’s less time for other activities, such as sport. Many universities don’t schedule any academic commitments on Wednesday afternoons. (I don’t know why it’s Wednesdays, it’s just that’s when it’s always been.) They do this so that everyone can get muddy on a field together or whack balls over nets — you know the sort of thing.

It’s not compulsory and plenty of students just use Wednesday afternoons to do other things like play in a band, rehearse a play, write the student paper or, of course, to sit around, drink coffee and chat.

Some even choose to study. Whatever milks your cow.

Another example: part-time students. Some universities go for part-timers in a big way. Derby, for instance, has as many part-time degree students as full-time ones. Meanwhile, at Birkbeck College (part of London University), well, they don’t have anything but part-timers.And, being part-time, they’re not around as much.

They aren’t necessarily any less committed to their courses or to their university, but most of them are part-time because they’ve got other lives to lead, whether a job, a family or whatever.

Such things don’t do much for creating a lively atmosphere. Imagine a party where everyone drops in for half an hour — it might have short periods when it’s a blast, but for most of the time it’s more like a bus garage.

A third and final example of a factor that can influence course style (I could go on for ages, but I’ll spare you): students' motives.Some courses are purely academic. Take, philosophy, say, or Ancient Greek. You can hardly call them job-oriented training — the demand for philosophers just isn’t what it was in the days of Plato, nor for people fluent in Ancient Greek.

If a university focuses on the more career-oriented stuff, it’s reflected in the students. They’re at university to get a qualification for a job, not necessarily to broaden their minds. As a result the atmosphere can be less broad-minded.

Just like all this stuff on atmosphere, that might be no bad thing. If what you want from university is to get a qualification for a job, then so-called ‘mind-broadening’ experiences are nothing more than time-wasting distractions that can take your eyes off the prize.​As you’ll probably have realised by now, in the same way that different universities and different sites can have a different atmosphere, so can different courses. Sciences, for instance, tend to have heavier scheduled workloads than arts subjects, but arts students often end up working late into the night keeping up with their reading lists or essays.​​

WHAT NOT TO STUDY

Up until now, admit it, school has been fairly easy. But with A-level choices looming on the horizon the scary thought, that what you choose now will decide what options you have in the future, might just rear its ugly head.

Just in case that wasn’t enough pressure, a group of universities called the Russell Group have published a guide announcing which of their universities prefer certain subjects and, more scarily, which subjects they consider too ‘soft’ to take into account.

What does this mean?

A few years ago a think-tank called The Policy Exchange published a report, with the to-the-point title of ‘The Hard Truth about Soft Subjects’. It listed A-level subjects on application forms that top universities were tossing into the rejection pile.

Privately the universities know exactly which subjects they look for and which they avoid and the report’s made that information public. With that information, it’s a lot easier to match your subjects with universities that will actually appreciate them or, if you’re starting early, match you subjects to your uni of choice.

The list of ‘soft subjects’ includes media, travel and tourism and even law. Not studying these at A-level, particularly if you want to, might seem a bit odd if you’re planning to study the same subjects at uni but if you have your heart set on Edinburgh, Imperial College, or any of the other Russel Group universities it might damage your chances to do so.

Like with wine, chocolate or anything else in life, moderation is the key to impressing these unis. Their guide stresses “students who take one ‘soft’ subject as part of a wider portfolio of subjects do not experience any problems applying to a Russell Group university.”

Alternatively, you can study what you want and see what happens, not every university agrees with the Russel Group after all.

​The Russel Group is a collection of 24 research-driven universities, who some would argue are held to the highest of academic standards. These occasionally change, but currently include:​

University of Birmingham

University of Bristol

University of Cambridge

Cardiff University

Durham University

University of Edinburgh

University of Exeter

University of Glasgow

Imperial College London

Kings College London

University of Leeds

University of Liverpool

London School of Economics and Political Science

University of Manchester

Newcastle University

University of Nottingham

University of Oxford

Queen Mary University of London

Queen's University, Belfast

University of Sheffield

University of Southampton

University College London

University of Warwick

University of York​

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF THE COURSE IS ANY GOOD?

Once upon a time, there was the pretence that all universities' degrees were equal — a 2:1 in Law at Oxford was no better or worse than it would be at Thames Valley University.

No one even pretends any more. Just like their students, every department at every university is assessed and given a series of grades. A whole bunch of numbers are produced, some of which are helpful in judging how much you're likely to gain from one of that department's courses.​The list of statistics available is growing every year, which on the whole is a good thing, but not all of them are that helpful. No one should ever pick a university just because of a single statistic. But some of them can be very handy when making that choice. Some example stats to consider are:

Teaching standards

Employment rates

Flunk rate/non-completion rate

Staff:student ratio

Percentage arriving through Clearing ​

Average UCAS points

Research standards

Number of postgrads

Study addicts

Other measures​

Wondering where you can find these figures? Head over to our Which Uni page for more info.

Okay, so having decided what you want to study, everything’s straightforward, right? Wrong. Could life ever be that simple? A course might have the same name at different universities and be just as different as the universities themselves. We’re not just talking about different lecturers, different rooms and stuff.Take English, for example: one university’s course might be focused mainly on the novel, giving you a choice of options to study ranging from the nineteenth century novel to postmodern American fiction. You can even submit creative writing as part of your work. Another university also has a course called English. Theirs stretches a bit further back, taking in options in classical dramatic traditions, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Old Norse, Chaucer through to Shakespeare, and also looking scientifically at language itself and how it evolves.Neither university necessarily offers a better degree in English than the other, just different. It’s down to you whether you’re more excited by the prospect of studying Beowulf or Bridget Jones.Then there are the subsids. Most single honours courses allow or require students to take subsidiary courses but, while English at one might offer you a particular buffet of side dishes to accompany your main course, at the other you might find a wider choice, a narrower choice or even no choice at all. Maybe you won’t be allowed to take a subsid, even if you want to (often the case with joint and combined honours courses). Maybe it’ll have to be a language or a science or an arts subject or a computing or vocational qualification.All these things can differ and a lot else besides. It depends on the university.Prospectuses are the most reliable place to fill in the details beyond the course title. Failing that, you can try websites or a quick phone call to the department to ask what options are available in the course. (The list of options may well change before you get there, but it’ll give you an idea.)

FINDING OUT ABOUT COURSES

Quite apart from the bewildering choice of different types of courses, all this diversity between courses at different departments and universities, and all the differences in how courses are organised might make you want to return to the dart-in-the-map plan.

But, when it comes to your degree, these things are going to make a huge difference, not only to how your study works, but how well you do, how much you enjoy it and, sometimes, whether you stick at it at all.

If university’s worth going to at all, it’s worth making the most of it, enjoying it as much as possible while at the same time maxing out on the qualifications.

The good news is that the information you need is pretty easy to find. We've got a guide to exactly where and which sources are to be trusted, head over to our which one page and the "RESOURCES TO HELP YOU" section.

​In the meantime, you’ll want to get hold of university prospectuses. They’re pretty reliable when it comes to academic information.

NEW SUBJECT POSSIBILITIES

If you’re trying to choose a course you’ll enjoy, you may want to rule out your A Level/Highers subjects if you’re already finding them boring. And other subjects may also be unsuitable if you dropped them because they were even more boring than that.The good news is that university offers a whole new range of subjects.

Who knows, you may eventually find them boring too, but at least they’ll be novel for a while.

To name but a few of the degree courses not often studied at A level: anthropology, philosophy, sociology, archaeology, accountancy, law, business studies, education, engineering, psychology, politics, gender studies and zoology. There are also the weirder, wackier options like brewing, golf course management, pop music studies and cybernetics.​You may want to get a taster of these courses before committing yourself to studying them for three years. Most universities offer open days which, at the very least, usually have introductions to courses by the people who teach them, but they often also feature sample lectures. Worth a try.

There are over 70,000 degree courses on offer in the UK. If you can’t find at least one that interests you, you should probably look in the mirror and ask whether it’s really the subjects that are boring.

On the other hand, you may be overwhelmed by the fascinating range of courses on offer, and may be loathe to limit yourself to just one.These days that’s no problem. Not every course is just ‘single honours’ (as it’s called). Oh no. Indeed, most courses require students to take some kind of subsidiary course.

TYPES OF COURSES

SUBSIDIARY COURSES

JOINT HONOURS

COMBINED HONOURS

MODULAR COURSES

SANDWICH COURSES

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A ‘subsid’ is like a side dish — it counts towards your final belly-full, but it’s not what you chose the restaurant for. So you might be taking maths as your main dish with a side salad of, say, physics, computing, Latin, or whatever. Many students regard subsids as nothing more than a distraction from the important stuff, but they’re usually a good opportunity to broaden your scope a notch and learn something new — something with, perhaps, more jobability than your main course. A language, for instance, or something vocational.Not every course at every university, however, offers subsids. And you can’t always pick whatever you want as a side dish. Some universities offer a very limited menu, either because of timetable clashes or because they simply can’t be arsed to give you the choice.

A ‘joint’ honours course is not a degree in cooking roasts of meat or rolling spliffs, but a course where you study two subjects equally. You gotta juggle. Some joint honours students complain that they don’t feel properly involved in either of their subjects and they’re not at home in either department.Others reckon it’s the best way of avoiding ever getting bored with your subject and, at the end of the day, they’ve got broader qualifications than other students.In reality, most joint honours students end up getting more into one subject than the other and, as the course goes on and they pick options for their second and third years, they find it amounts to little more than a delicious single honours degree that comes with with a particularly demanding sidesalad. More on the application process..On which topic it’s worth mentioning that, since your time’s already divided, most joint honours courses don’t allow (let alone offer) subsids. Most, but not all.

‘Combined’ honours is the same really as joint honours, but instead of two equal subjects, you might have three (or more, even). Now the juggling gets to be a real challenge. It’s quite a challenge to complete a combined honours course giving equal weight to all three subjects all the way through and feeling like you’ve really got to grips with them all. You tend to end up dropping at least one of your balls — to continue the juggling metaphor.But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can give you even more time to flirt and fall in love with your subject at degree level before committing to it, forsaking all others.

The ultimate pick ’n’ degree is the modular course. Not everywhere offers them and they vary from university to university (at some they’re no more than jumped up combined honours degrees), but the general idea is that you’re free to study ‘modules’ in just about any subject. You might do, say, four or five modules in a year and, so long as you pass them, you pick up credits. Get enough credits, you get a degree. It’s not all cherry-picking though. Most modular courses require you to take (and pass) certain ‘core’ modules — usually ones you need for certain careers — and your choice is further compromised by a range of ‘pathways’ where they tell you what you can and can’t mix.A big advantage is that you get to do a little of a lot of different things. It’s a big disadvantage too. Many students on modular courses do tend to find themselves choosing modules in the second and third year that they could have done within a more traditional course structure. But, hey: it doesn’t matter how you get there, just that you get there.For students who may need to come and go out of higher education, however, the system really works. You can just keeping dropping in and out, doing a job for a while, coming back to take a module or two, and so on, stashing up the credits until either you’ve got a degree or as much of one as you want. (This isn’t just messing about with the system. It’s a recognised scheme called CATS — Credit Accumulation and Transfer — designed to help people continue education and improve their qualifications throughout their lives.)

Sandwich courses are nothing to do with bread and fillings, unless they happen to be at the Ginsters factory. It’s a metaphor. The bread symbolises slices of academic study. The filling is job experience on a work placement. Basically, sandwich courses – thin, thick, club, toasted, whatever – are those that involve an industrial placement as a compulsory part of the course. In order to fit in the filling, most sandwich degree courses are four years rather than three.

This can be the answer to every strapped student’s woes, because they usually get paid for the working part of their course. It’s rarely as much as they’d get if they were doing the job as a fully paid-up employee, but that’s what’s in it for the employer. The student gets to do their course and the employer gets someone who is capable and cheap.

As a result, sandwich students tend to have fewer financial worries than most. Better still, sandwich courses also have a pretty good record of getting students into jobs when they graduate, quite often with the company they did the placement with.

It’s not all pay slips and high living, though. There are added expenses for sandwich students. For example, you’ll probably have to own a couple of smart outfits, forego the student lie-in and not have a clue what is going on in Neighbours.

TEACHER TRAINING

The UK needs teachers at the moment like the transport system needs a good kick up the bum. As a result, there’s rarely been a better time to give teacher training a whirl.

The Government has been offering greater incentives for trainee teachers, especially for postgrads on PGCEs and those doing the subjects that are most needed: Maths, English, History, Geography, Science, Computing, Design and Tech, Religious Education, Music and Modern Foreign Languages. ​

PGCEs

OTHER ROUTES

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To be a teacher you have to have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and a PGCE is the most popular way of getting it. PGCE stands for Postgraduate Certificate in Education. As the name suggests you need to be a graduate to do the course, which covers initial teacher training.

PGCEs are normally a year long (or two, if you study part-time).

A Postgraduate Certificate in Education is a postgraduate course which qualifies students to become teachers. Unfortunately the Student Loans Company won't be paying for it. However, students working towards a career teaching one of the above desirable subjects are eligible for grants of up to £25,000 at the moment.

A PGCE's not the only way to become a teacher – if you want SLC funding, you can do a four-year Bachelor of Education undergrad degree. Currently, universities can charge up to £9,250 for them. Students can take out a government loan to cover these fees which is paid back after graduation when they're pulling in more than £21,000 a year.

This is exactly the same as with any other undergrad courses. Students should also be eligible for the same (partly means-tested) maintenance loan for living costs.

In Wales, the system’s very similar, except training bursaries are only worth up to £20,000. However, PGCE students will be eligible for the extra fee grant that Welsh undergrads get to make up the difference. Welsh is on the list of shortage subjects too (and therefore has rewards that go with teaching it), and there’s also extra help available for those wanting to teach in Welsh. ​

OTHER ROUTES

You can get your QTS by doing a (usually four-year) undergraduate course of teacher training that leads to a first degree – normally a BEd. Push doesn’t recommend it right now though as you’ll be liable to pay the normal fee contributions (subject to assessment) and all you’ll get to live on is the normal student loan and means-tested grant. Better to spend three years on any old interesting degree and then do a PGCE afterwards. It doesn’t take any longer and the demand for teachers is such that the Government's unlikely to drop the sweetenersfor a while yet.

There are also a couple of employment-based routes, such as School Direct, which are somewhat aimed at older students. Trainees are paid a salary while training – this depends on the subject, former experience and your responsibilities though

​FURTHER INFO

As the holy grail of teacher training info, your first port of call should be the Government's site, Get into Teaching. It's an incredibly informative site, and tells you all about the different pathways into teaching.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TEACHING AND MARKING

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TEACHING

It’s not just what you study that differs. It’s how you study it.Teaching methods vary from one university to another. There are rarely ‘lessons’ as such. In fact, there are at least four different teaching methods that take the place of lessons:

Lectures: A lecturer, tutor, professor or ‘don’ stands at the front of a hall and transfers his notes to yours through the process of speech. Might be anything from 15 to 200 students.

Tutorials: Occasionally one-to-one, but more usually a small group of students discussing with a lecturer, tutor or whatever.

Seminars: The most lesson-like approach and a cross between a lecture and a tutorial; usually 5 to 20 students.

Practicals: Experimental work, usually restricted to sciences.

These aren’t the only way of doing it though. Far from it. There’s field work, for instance — which, in the case of agriculture or archaeology often does indeed involve working in fields — but, more generally, it’s any out-and-about project work. There’s also distance learning (sending and receiving instructions and resources through the post or email), virtual learning (web-based teaching) and so on.Every university and, indeed, every course uses its own mix of these — and other — methods. Alongside being taught, students are supposed to do a lot of learning for themselves, just plain studying (hence the name ‘student’) in books, on the web or wherever is appropriate to their subject.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO GETTING MARKED

The ways different universities have of assessing your grades is more varied than a packet of schizoid Smarties. Some place the emphasis on exams, while others spend more time on continual assessment or particular pieces of work like projects, work placements, essays (usually up to about 3,000 words), extended essays (3,000 to 8,000), dissertations (really just extended extended essays — anything from 5,000 words to 25,000) or a thesis (usually for postgrads only, and any length over about 15,000 words).Performance in seminars, tutorials and the like is sometimes taken into account, but not always.Whether you’re bad at exams, a shrinking violet in class or too much of a procrastinator ever to write decent essays, there’s a different assessment technique to suit you.I reckon nearly a third of students could bump themselves up a grade just by choosing more carefully a university that’ll grade them by their strengths.As for the grades themselves, there’s not quite so much variety. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not confusing.Most undergraduate courses lead to an ‘honours’ degree. (If you hear someone boasting that they have an honours degree, ignore the word ‘honours’ in the sentence and then decide whether they’ve got anything to boast about.)The grades, in descending order, are:

2:2 (pronounced ‘two-two’ or ‘lower second’; commonly known as a ‘Desmond’ after Bishop Tutu)

3rd

Below that, students might get a ‘recommended pass’ (aka ‘RP’) which means they don’t get an honours degree after all, but an ‘ordinary’ degree. And below that, there’s failure.There are weird grades like ‘aegrotat’, but they’re not worth worrying about.Once you’ve got your degree, you get letters after your name. BSc (Bachelor of Science) and BA (Bachelor of Arts) are the most common, but there’s also BEd (not for oversleeping but for education), BEng (engineering) and so on. The range of postgrad letters is even more bewildering — MA, MSc, MBA, PhD, DLitt, LLB, PGCE and that’s just for starters.These bachelors’ degrees are the standard scroll you get in England, Wales and Northern Ireland where most undergraduate courses only last three years. In Scotland, however, most courses are four years and students end up with an MA or MSc (Master of ).Oxford and Cambridge, as usual, have their own way of doing things. You get your bachelor’s degree after three years but, after a set time in the real world — usually a year — if you’ve kept your nose clean, you can have a master’s degree (for a small fee, but no extra study).

Which Course?

How do you choose the right course for you? Rule 1: do what you enjoy and you'll enjoy what you do. ​

Considering courses: A few questions

What career do you want?

What course or courses might help you get it?

What do you enjoy studying?

What course might you enjoy, but haven’t tried yet?

Would you like to do more than one subject?

Would you like a vocational element to your course?

How much flexibility would you like about your course once you’ve started it?

For any course you’re considering, have you checked what the course includes? (Remember: it varies from university to university.)

For any course you’re considering, have you checked out how it’s taught? (Remember: it varies from university to university.)

How would you like your course to be graded? What form of assessment suits you? Which Uni?

your plans

If you have your heart set on a career

If you don't know what you want to do

<

>

IF YOU ALREADY HAVE YOUR HEART SET ON A CAREER, then you can work backwards. What’s going to help you job-wise?

You may need to limit yourself to certain courses. For instance, for medicine, dentistry and various other professions, there are certain bits of paper you have to be able to frame on your wall.

But that’s not true for every career. Even lawyers and teachers — who also require specific qualifications — can start off with more general degrees and then take postgraduate conversion courses.

In many cases, it doesn’t actually take any longer. For example, most Bachelor of Education courses (which qualify you to be a teacher) take four years — but in the same time you could spend three years studying whatever undergraduate degree grabs your fancy followed by a year doing a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education). You end up just as well qualified and, at the moment, most PGCE students can get more funding.However, if you’re only sure of the general direction you want your career to take, don’t sweat it — just keep your options open. Most graduate jobs need nothing more than a degree in something vaguely appropriate. But that still means thinking about what course might be vaguely appropriate so that when the crunch comes you’ve got the credentials.

For journalism, say, you might want to think about politics or English. For conservation work, you’d be better off with something like geography, biology, or ecology. But for a job in business, you could pick almost anything: accountancy, languages, business studies, marketing, computing, economics.

A word of warning: some courses that may seem career-specific don’t necessarily help. The classic example is media studies. Push isn’t dismissing all media studies courses — some are great, particularly if they focus on the technical aspects of the industry — but if you want to work in TV, for instance, a non-‘media’ degree could actually help you stand out from the crowd more. If the BBC’s making a programme about the mating rituals of wombats, for example, they’re more likely to give a break to someone who studied zoology and worked on their student TV station than to someone who spent three years doing Marxist analyses of Eastenders plotlines.

But, if you aren't so sure of what you want to do or study FEAR NOT! Have a look at Bestcourse4me which can help you on your way.

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM UNIVERSITY?

Ultimately, your choice of course depends on what you want from your university.

Here’s a quick guide:You want to get a good job: Try to be specific about what kind of good job you want. Then do a course that’s, at best, a direct qualification, or at least, vaguely appropriate. You might want to consider ‘vocational’ courses. These are any courses designed to teach you a particular career — although not only do they not necessarily guarantee you a job, they may not even help you get one.

Vocational courses — particularly the best ones — usually involve some kind of link with the relevant industry. Sometimes they’re even 'sandwich courses' — which means you spend some time actually working for a company (and, yes, you do get paid). There are thick sandwiches and thin sandwiches, depending on the amount of time you spend working. (There are probably club sandwich courses somewhere too, but Push suspects they’re part of a catering degree.) Some universities, particularly the ones that used to be polytechnics, specialise in vocational courses. Many of them have excellent relations with businesses and employers and their graduates get jobs easily. Others don’t .

Sometimes, if you want to get a good job, it doesn’t matter what course you do, so long as you’re at a university with a good reputation.

You want to study for the sheer thrill of academic endeavour: Again, follow your fancy. You’re clearly already committed (or perhaps should have already been committed to an asylum).

You want to have a good time: There’s no such thing as a ‘doss’ course at university. If you want to do well, you pretty much have to put in the hours whatever the subject.

Having said that, there are some subjects where the course is rigidly structured — lectures and the like from nine to five, plus lots of work at weekends — and there are others where you get to manage your own time a bit more. Traditionally, it’s the sciences where your daily schedule is wall-to-wall, and it’s arts students who earn the reputation for lying in bed all day. Many arts students, however, work just as hard — it’s simply that they have huge reading lists and are often left to get on with it.

To have a good time, the same rule always applies: pick a course you’re going to enjoy, then grab the other opportunities that student life chucks at you.

More info

THE COURSE STYLE

THE COURSE STYLE

It’s not just what courses a university offers that affects its atmosphere, but how they’re taught — one teaching method may work for you, another may not.

If the timetable is heavy — full of long lectures, seminars and practicals — then it doesn’t leave too much time in the day for the favourite student pastime of sitting around, drinking coffee and chatting. That means the place feels less laid-back. But ‘laid-back’ may not be what you want anyway — that’s your call.

It may also mean there’s less time for other activities, such as sport. Many universities don’t schedule any academic commitments on Wednesday afternoons. (I don’t know why it’s Wednesdays, it’s just that’s when it’s always been.) They do this so that everyone can get muddy on a field together or whack balls over nets — you know the sort of thing.

It’s not compulsory and plenty of students just use Wednesday afternoons to do other things like play in a band, rehearse a play, write the student paper or, of course, to sit around, drink coffee and chat.

Some even choose to study. Whatever milks your cow.

Another example: part-time students. Some universities go for part-timers in a big way. Derby, for instance, has as many part-time degree students as full-time ones. Meanwhile, at Birkbeck College (part of London University), well, they don’t have anything but part-timers.And, being part-time, they’re not around as much.

They aren’t necessarily any less committed to their courses or to their university, but most of them are part-time because they’ve got other lives to lead, whether a job, a family or whatever.

Such things don’t do much for creating a lively atmosphere. Imagine a party where everyone drops in for half an hour — it might have short periods when it’s a blast, but for most of the time it’s more like a bus garage.

A third and final example of a factor that can influence course style (I could go on for ages, but I’ll spare you): students' motives.Some courses are purely academic. Take, philosophy, say, or Ancient Greek. You can hardly call them job-oriented training — the demand for philosophers just isn’t what it was in the days of Plato, nor for people fluent in Ancient Greek.

If a university focuses on the more career-oriented stuff, it’s reflected in the students. They’re at university to get a qualification for a job, not necessarily to broaden their minds. As a result the atmosphere can be less broad-minded.

Just like all this stuff on atmosphere, that might be no bad thing. If what you want from university is to get a qualification for a job, then so-called ‘mind-broadening’ experiences are nothing more than time-wasting distractions that can take your eyes off the prize.​As you’ll probably have realised by now, in the same way that different universities and different sites can have a different atmosphere, so can different courses. Sciences, for instance, tend to have heavier scheduled workloads than arts subjects, but arts students often end up working late into the night keeping up with their reading lists or essays.​​

WHAT NOT TO STUDY

Up until now, admit it, school has been fairly easy. But with A-level choices looming on the horizon the scary thought, that what you choose now will decide what options you have in the future, might just rear its ugly head.

Just in case that wasn’t enough pressure, a group of universities called the Russell Group have published a guide announcing which of their universities prefer certain subjects and, more scarily, which subjects they consider too ‘soft’ to take into account.

What does this mean?

A few years ago a think-tank called The Policy Exchange published a report, with the to-the-point title of ‘The Hard Truth about Soft Subjects’. It listed A-level subjects on application forms that top universities were tossing into the rejection pile.

Privately the universities know exactly which subjects they look for and which they avoid and the report’s made that information public. With that information, it’s a lot easier to match your subjects with universities that will actually appreciate them or, if you’re starting early, match you subjects to your uni of choice.

The list of ‘soft subjects’ includes media, travel and tourism and even law. Not studying these at A-level, particularly if you want to, might seem a bit odd if you’re planning to study the same subjects at uni but if you have your heart set on Edinburgh, Imperial College, or any of the other Russel Group universities it might damage your chances to do so.

Like with wine, chocolate or anything else in life, moderation is the key to impressing these unis. Their guide stresses “students who take one ‘soft’ subject as part of a wider portfolio of subjects do not experience any problems applying to a Russell Group university.”

Alternatively, you can study what you want and see what happens, not every university agrees with the Russel Group after all.

​The Russel Group is a collection of 24 research-driven universities, who some would argue are held to the highest of academic standards. These occasionally change, but currently include:​

University of Birmingham

University of Bristol

University of Cambridge

Cardiff University

Durham University

University of Edinburgh

University of Exeter

University of Glasgow

Imperial College London

Kings College London

University of Leeds

University of Liverpool

London School of Economics and Political Science

University of Manchester

Newcastle University

University of Nottingham

University of Oxford

Queen Mary University of London

Queen's University, Belfast

University of Sheffield

University of Southampton

University College London

University of Warwick

University of York​

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF THE COURSE IS ANY GOOD?

Once upon a time, there was the pretence that all universities' degrees were equal — a 2:1 in Law at Oxford was no better or worse than it would be at Thames Valley University.

No one even pretends any more. Just like their students, every department at every university is assessed and given a series of grades. A whole bunch of numbers are produced, some of which are helpful in judging how much you're likely to gain from one of that department's courses.​The list of statistics available is growing every year, which on the whole is a good thing, but not all of them are that helpful. No one should ever pick a university just because of a single statistic. But some of them can be very handy when making that choice. Some example stats to consider are:

Teaching standards

Employment rates

Flunk rate/non-completion rate

Staff:student ratio

Percentage arriving through Clearing ​

Average UCAS points

Research standards

Number of postgrads

Study addicts

Other measures​

Wondering where you can find these figures? Head over to our Which Uni page for more info.

Okay, so having decided what you want to study, everything’s straightforward, right? Wrong. Could life ever be that simple? A course might have the same name at different universities and be just as different as the universities themselves. We’re not just talking about different lecturers, different rooms and stuff.Take English, for example: one university’s course might be focused mainly on the novel, giving you a choice of options to study ranging from the nineteenth century novel to postmodern American fiction. You can even submit creative writing as part of your work. Another university also has a course called English. Theirs stretches a bit further back, taking in options in classical dramatic traditions, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Old Norse, Chaucer through to Shakespeare, and also looking scientifically at language itself and how it evolves.Neither university necessarily offers a better degree in English than the other, just different. It’s down to you whether you’re more excited by the prospect of studying Beowulf or Bridget Jones.Then there are the subsids. Most single honours courses allow or require students to take subsidiary courses but, while English at one might offer you a particular buffet of side dishes to accompany your main course, at the other you might find a wider choice, a narrower choice or even no choice at all. Maybe you won’t be allowed to take a subsid, even if you want to (often the case with joint and combined honours courses). Maybe it’ll have to be a language or a science or an arts subject or a computing or vocational qualification.All these things can differ and a lot else besides. It depends on the university.Prospectuses are the most reliable place to fill in the details beyond the course title. Failing that, you can try websites or a quick phone call to the department to ask what options are available in the course. (The list of options may well change before you get there, but it’ll give you an idea.)

FINDING OUT ABOUT COURSES

Quite apart from the bewildering choice of different types of courses, all this diversity between courses at different departments and universities, and all the differences in how courses are organised might make you want to return to the dart-in-the-map plan.

But, when it comes to your degree, these things are going to make a huge difference, not only to how your study works, but how well you do, how much you enjoy it and, sometimes, whether you stick at it at all.

If university’s worth going to at all, it’s worth making the most of it, enjoying it as much as possible while at the same time maxing out on the qualifications.

The good news is that the information you need is pretty easy to find. We've got a guide to exactly where and which sources are to be trusted, head over to our which one page and the "RESOURCES TO HELP YOU" section.

​In the meantime, you’ll want to get hold of university prospectuses. They’re pretty reliable when it comes to academic information.

NEW SUBJECT POSSIBILITIES

If you’re trying to choose a course you’ll enjoy, you may want to rule out your A Level/Highers subjects if you’re already finding them boring. And other subjects may also be unsuitable if you dropped them because they were even more boring than that.The good news is that university offers a whole new range of subjects.

Who knows, you may eventually find them boring too, but at least they’ll be novel for a while.

To name but a few of the degree courses not often studied at A level: anthropology, philosophy, sociology, archaeology, accountancy, law, business studies, education, engineering, psychology, politics, gender studies and zoology. There are also the weirder, wackier options like brewing, golf course management, pop music studies and cybernetics.​You may want to get a taster of these courses before committing yourself to studying them for three years. Most universities offer open days which, at the very least, usually have introductions to courses by the people who teach them, but they often also feature sample lectures. Worth a try.

There are over 70,000 degree courses on offer in the UK. If you can’t find at least one that interests you, you should probably look in the mirror and ask whether it’s really the subjects that are boring.

On the other hand, you may be overwhelmed by the fascinating range of courses on offer, and may be loathe to limit yourself to just one.These days that’s no problem. Not every course is just ‘single honours’ (as it’s called). Oh no. Indeed, most courses require students to take some kind of subsidiary course.

TYPES OF COURSES

SUBSIDIARY COURSES

JOINT HONOURS

COMBINED HONOURS

MODULAR COURSES

SANDWICH COURSES

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A ‘subsid’ is like a side dish — it counts towards your final belly-full, but it’s not what you chose the restaurant for. So you might be taking maths as your main dish with a side salad of, say, physics, computing, Latin, or whatever. Many students regard subsids as nothing more than a distraction from the important stuff, but they’re usually a good opportunity to broaden your scope a notch and learn something new — something with, perhaps, more jobability than your main course. A language, for instance, or something vocational.Not every course at every university, however, offers subsids. And you can’t always pick whatever you want as a side dish. Some universities offer a very limited menu, either because of timetable clashes or because they simply can’t be arsed to give you the choice.

A ‘joint’ honours course is not a degree in cooking roasts of meat or rolling spliffs, but a course where you study two subjects equally. You gotta juggle. Some joint honours students complain that they don’t feel properly involved in either of their subjects and they’re not at home in either department.Others reckon it’s the best way of avoiding ever getting bored with your subject and, at the end of the day, they’ve got broader qualifications than other students.In reality, most joint honours students end up getting more into one subject than the other and, as the course goes on and they pick options for their second and third years, they find it amounts to little more than a delicious single honours degree that comes with with a particularly demanding sidesalad. More on the application process..On which topic it’s worth mentioning that, since your time’s already divided, most joint honours courses don’t allow (let alone offer) subsids. Most, but not all.

‘Combined’ honours is the same really as joint honours, but instead of two equal subjects, you might have three (or more, even). Now the juggling gets to be a real challenge. It’s quite a challenge to complete a combined honours course giving equal weight to all three subjects all the way through and feeling like you’ve really got to grips with them all. You tend to end up dropping at least one of your balls — to continue the juggling metaphor.But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can give you even more time to flirt and fall in love with your subject at degree level before committing to it, forsaking all others.

The ultimate pick ’n’ degree is the modular course. Not everywhere offers them and they vary from university to university (at some they’re no more than jumped up combined honours degrees), but the general idea is that you’re free to study ‘modules’ in just about any subject. You might do, say, four or five modules in a year and, so long as you pass them, you pick up credits. Get enough credits, you get a degree. It’s not all cherry-picking though. Most modular courses require you to take (and pass) certain ‘core’ modules — usually ones you need for certain careers — and your choice is further compromised by a range of ‘pathways’ where they tell you what you can and can’t mix.A big advantage is that you get to do a little of a lot of different things. It’s a big disadvantage too. Many students on modular courses do tend to find themselves choosing modules in the second and third year that they could have done within a more traditional course structure. But, hey: it doesn’t matter how you get there, just that you get there.For students who may need to come and go out of higher education, however, the system really works. You can just keeping dropping in and out, doing a job for a while, coming back to take a module or two, and so on, stashing up the credits until either you’ve got a degree or as much of one as you want. (This isn’t just messing about with the system. It’s a recognised scheme called CATS — Credit Accumulation and Transfer — designed to help people continue education and improve their qualifications throughout their lives.)

Sandwich courses are nothing to do with bread and fillings, unless they happen to be at the Ginsters factory. It’s a metaphor. The bread symbolises slices of academic study. The filling is job experience on a work placement. Basically, sandwich courses – thin, thick, club, toasted, whatever – are those that involve an industrial placement as a compulsory part of the course. In order to fit in the filling, most sandwich degree courses are four years rather than three.

This can be the answer to every strapped student’s woes, because they usually get paid for the working part of their course. It’s rarely as much as they’d get if they were doing the job as a fully paid-up employee, but that’s what’s in it for the employer. The student gets to do their course and the employer gets someone who is capable and cheap.

As a result, sandwich students tend to have fewer financial worries than most. Better still, sandwich courses also have a pretty good record of getting students into jobs when they graduate, quite often with the company they did the placement with.

It’s not all pay slips and high living, though. There are added expenses for sandwich students. For example, you’ll probably have to own a couple of smart outfits, forego the student lie-in and not have a clue what is going on in Neighbours.

TEACHER TRAINING

The UK needs teachers at the moment like the transport system needs a good kick up the bum. As a result, there’s rarely been a better time to give teacher training a whirl.

The Government has been offering greater incentives for trainee teachers, especially for postgrads on PGCEs and those doing the subjects that are most needed: Maths, English, History, Geography, Science, Computing, Design and Tech, Religious Education, Music and Modern Foreign Languages. ​

PGCEs

OTHER ROUTES

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To be a teacher you have to have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and a PGCE is the most popular way of getting it. PGCE stands for Postgraduate Certificate in Education. As the name suggests you need to be a graduate to do the course, which covers initial teacher training.

PGCEs are normally a year long (or two, if you study part-time).

A Postgraduate Certificate in Education is a postgraduate course which qualifies students to become teachers. Unfortunately the Student Loans Company won't be paying for it. However, students working towards a career teaching one of the above desirable subjects are eligible for grants of up to £25,000 at the moment.

A PGCE's not the only way to become a teacher – if you want SLC funding, you can do a four-year Bachelor of Education undergrad degree. Currently, universities can charge up to £9,250 for them. Students can take out a government loan to cover these fees which is paid back after graduation when they're pulling in more than £21,000 a year.

This is exactly the same as with any other undergrad courses. Students should also be eligible for the same (partly means-tested) maintenance loan for living costs.

In Wales, the system’s very similar, except training bursaries are only worth up to £20,000. However, PGCE students will be eligible for the extra fee grant that Welsh undergrads get to make up the difference. Welsh is on the list of shortage subjects too (and therefore has rewards that go with teaching it), and there’s also extra help available for those wanting to teach in Welsh. ​

OTHER ROUTES

You can get your QTS by doing a (usually four-year) undergraduate course of teacher training that leads to a first degree – normally a BEd. Push doesn’t recommend it right now though as you’ll be liable to pay the normal fee contributions (subject to assessment) and all you’ll get to live on is the normal student loan and means-tested grant. Better to spend three years on any old interesting degree and then do a PGCE afterwards. It doesn’t take any longer and the demand for teachers is such that the Government's unlikely to drop the sweetenersfor a while yet.

There are also a couple of employment-based routes, such as School Direct, which are somewhat aimed at older students. Trainees are paid a salary while training – this depends on the subject, former experience and your responsibilities though

​FURTHER INFO

As the holy grail of teacher training info, your first port of call should be the Government's site, Get into Teaching. It's an incredibly informative site, and tells you all about the different pathways into teaching.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TEACHING AND MARKING

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TEACHING

It’s not just what you study that differs. It’s how you study it.Teaching methods vary from one university to another. There are rarely ‘lessons’ as such. In fact, there are at least four different teaching methods that take the place of lessons:

Lectures: A lecturer, tutor, professor or ‘don’ stands at the front of a hall and transfers his notes to yours through the process of speech. Might be anything from 15 to 200 students.

Tutorials: Occasionally one-to-one, but more usually a small group of students discussing with a lecturer, tutor or whatever.

Seminars: The most lesson-like approach and a cross between a lecture and a tutorial; usually 5 to 20 students.

Practicals: Experimental work, usually restricted to sciences.

These aren’t the only way of doing it though. Far from it. There’s field work, for instance — which, in the case of agriculture or archaeology often does indeed involve working in fields — but, more generally, it’s any out-and-about project work. There’s also distance learning (sending and receiving instructions and resources through the post or email), virtual learning (web-based teaching) and so on.Every university and, indeed, every course uses its own mix of these — and other — methods. Alongside being taught, students are supposed to do a lot of learning for themselves, just plain studying (hence the name ‘student’) in books, on the web or wherever is appropriate to their subject.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO GETTING MARKED

The ways different universities have of assessing your grades is more varied than a packet of schizoid Smarties. Some place the emphasis on exams, while others spend more time on continual assessment or particular pieces of work like projects, work placements, essays (usually up to about 3,000 words), extended essays (3,000 to 8,000), dissertations (really just extended extended essays — anything from 5,000 words to 25,000) or a thesis (usually for postgrads only, and any length over about 15,000 words).Performance in seminars, tutorials and the like is sometimes taken into account, but not always.Whether you’re bad at exams, a shrinking violet in class or too much of a procrastinator ever to write decent essays, there’s a different assessment technique to suit you.I reckon nearly a third of students could bump themselves up a grade just by choosing more carefully a university that’ll grade them by their strengths.As for the grades themselves, there’s not quite so much variety. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not confusing.Most undergraduate courses lead to an ‘honours’ degree. (If you hear someone boasting that they have an honours degree, ignore the word ‘honours’ in the sentence and then decide whether they’ve got anything to boast about.)The grades, in descending order, are:

2:2 (pronounced ‘two-two’ or ‘lower second’; commonly known as a ‘Desmond’ after Bishop Tutu)

3rd

Below that, students might get a ‘recommended pass’ (aka ‘RP’) which means they don’t get an honours degree after all, but an ‘ordinary’ degree. And below that, there’s failure.There are weird grades like ‘aegrotat’, but they’re not worth worrying about.Once you’ve got your degree, you get letters after your name. BSc (Bachelor of Science) and BA (Bachelor of Arts) are the most common, but there’s also BEd (not for oversleeping but for education), BEng (engineering) and so on. The range of postgrad letters is even more bewildering — MA, MSc, MBA, PhD, DLitt, LLB, PGCE and that’s just for starters.These bachelors’ degrees are the standard scroll you get in England, Wales and Northern Ireland where most undergraduate courses only last three years. In Scotland, however, most courses are four years and students end up with an MA or MSc (Master of ).Oxford and Cambridge, as usual, have their own way of doing things. You get your bachelor’s degree after three years but, after a set time in the real world — usually a year — if you’ve kept your nose clean, you can have a master’s degree (for a small fee, but no extra study).